Really? As a confirmed Apple hater I would love to believe this but... to develop for Apple I would have to buy a Mac. Then I would have to pay what is it... $100/year the last I checked to get the development environment. (chump change I guess after buying a Mac) Then.. the only way the app could ever get on to more than a fraction of a percent of people's devices is to get it approved by the Apple store which everyone I have talked to claims is a real pain in the ass.

To develop for Android just download the development environment for your favorite of Linux/Windows/Mac OS for free and start coding. It seems to me that Google is trying a lot harder to get developers than Apple is.

What I think is the real issue is that a lot of developers don't want to deal with the variety of screen sizes one finds on Android. They like Apple's closed little world. HTML was supposed to free us of this issue. With sizes being defined in percents, data inside of elements that describe what the data is, not how to display it, etc... devices were supposed to determine how to display things best based on their own unique hardware profiles. That was html documents but by now applications should work that way too.

But... thest f@!#ng graphics designers and marketers had to mess that all up. Instead everything is defined down to how it will look pixel per pixel. So of course... supporting many different sizes and shapes of devices means making sure your pixel by pixel design looks good on them all. So.. the lazy fckrs only want to support iOS because it is easier to design that way in a limited environment.

Having no laws against something is not the same thing as allowing it. There are regulations, Comcast is required to have net neutrality for x years due to merger and the like.

Total fearmongering unsupported by evidence. The government that supposedly can't "do very much right" has regulated voice telephony under common-carrier rules for about 90 years. And before that it was the telegraph services, and before them the railroads. Common-carrier was instituted to regulate the abuses of the rail barons. We have a long experience with government common-carrier regulations, and it seems to me that they have worked out pretty well.

For a taste of the alternative, consider what would happen if your local phone company said to American Airlines, "none of our customers can call your reservation center unless you pay us 5% of the ticket sales. After all, you're using our wires for free! And if you don't pay, your callers will get a busy signal 90% of the time." Suppose that, like almost everyone on US broadband, you had no alternative of using another phone company. Pricing based on the apparent value to the customer of the traffic would be a disaster. It was, in the case of the old railroads. And in both cases, it was possible only because there is no effective alternative carrier.

The free market only works when there actually is a market.

That is a possible outcome, but it is not really a probable outcome.

Basic web sight trafic is trivial compared to voice and video traffic, and any telco who throttled or blocked web sights would be at a competitive disadvantage against one who didn't.

There's no incentive for the telcos to go hitting up individual web masters most of who barely break even as it is for fees to be on their network (they won't get them and they'll only stand to generate bad publicity if something like XKCD disappears from their network one day).

The problem is that they can't charge everyone what it would cost to stream HD video 24/7, and without the ability to differentiate traffic they can't use a multi-tiered pay structure to charge people who don't use video streaming much less than people who use it heavily.

I wouldn't, even though I agree with him, because he's semiliterate and doesn't know the difference between were and where. Semiliterates don't belong here. I hate semiliterate slashdot comments even more than I hate Beta (and I've seen more and more of them here, why can't kids today read or write?).

The Jade Rabbit is the best vibrator I've ever owned. Do yourself a favor and get one (or two!). They go great on the clit, in the pussy, in the ass, tickling the dick or nipples, and (my personal favorite) pressed up tight against your taint, just under the scrotum.

I agree - teach the contraversy. We have seen enough things fall by the wayside in the history of science that we should not consider anything with reverance, e.g. flat earth, sun circles the earth, etc.

Teach the scientific method and let the kids sort it out!

The original framers of the constitution recognized this at the founding of the republic.

"The Congress shall have Power To...promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries...."

Nobody objects to people having the protection of a limited copyright so that they can profit from their ideas. Everyone - including, I'd argue, most copyright holders but excepting apparently their very successful lobbyists and tame congresspeople - agrees that "copyright" != "rights to exclusivity in perpetuity so that person and their heirs never have to work again".

As Regan looked at the world through the fog of dementia and dirty windows at the White House he couldn't distinguish between movie scripts and reality. (Remember the refit of the New Jersey?) It seems that Cameron has lost more than a few brain cells too.

Following the link referenced we get: "From the statistics below (collected from W3Schools' log-files over a period of ten years), you can read the long term trends of browser usage."

So this data set really shows only the behavior of access to the w3schools.com site. Don't make inferences across the general population.

Yes, but remember "Developers, Developers, Developers!". If the developers start abandoning IE, then your platform will no longer have the best experience and further encouage users to move to others, like Firefox/Chrome.

They aren't going to store a big database of valid credit card numbers so they can return someone else's card number, they'll just generate a random number that looks like it could be a real credit card number and passes the checksum test.

Yes, a criminal could take the credit card numbers from each decryption attempt and test them, but if he's willing to test millions of card numbers to look for a valid one, he could just generate the card numbers directly and not attempt the decryption in the first place.

People misunderstand what "security through obscurity" means. Most (all?) encryption relies on security through obscurity at some level.

Hiding your house key under a loose floorboard in your back deck is the kind of security through obscurity that can really work, assuming that there are no other clues that lead to the hiding place. However, hiding the prybar that you use to pry up the floorboard under the belief that hiding the method of access makes your key safer is not the kind of obscurity that works because if the attacker can find your hiding place, he can figure another way to get to the key.

Similarly, hiding or not writing down your password is security through obscurity that works. But trying to hide the implementation details of your cipher algorithm does not, because cryptoanalysis can break your encryption even without access to your encryption algorithm.

So, obscuring your real password among an endless number of fake passwords is the kind of obscurity that can work -- even if the attacker knows that your password is somewhere among the billions of fake ones, unless he has some clue to tell him what your real password looks like, just knowing that fakes are there doesn't help him.